In Washington, D.C., a high-profile teacher evaluation system will be tweaked so that low-performing teachers are given greater scrutiny, while standardized test scores carry a bit less weight. The D.C. teacher evaluation system was one of the first in the country to link teacher pay and job security to student achievement when it was launched three years ago. Earlier this week, school officials in D.C. announced that 98 teachers had been fired for poor performance, “a large-scale dismissal that has become almost routine in the city but remains rare among school systems nationwide,” Emma Brown wrote in the Washington Post. In an article that appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Education Next, “Capturing the Dimensions of Effective Teaching,” Tom Kane describes findings from the Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project. The project is looking at how a combination of test-based student achievement gains, classroom observations, and student surveys can be used to evaluate teachers.

In this podcast from the Ed Next archives, the architect of D.C.’s teacher evaluation system, Jason Kamras, described the system just before it was put into place.